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Even more schema.org markup examples

In my last post, I introduced the basics for OpenGraph and Schema.org markup. In this post I’m going to look at more examples of content types.

Some background on Schema.org markup

Schema.org markup lets you specify objects to let search engines (and social networks) have a more accurate way of rendering content and is Google’s preferred way of marking up objects on the web. I speak a little more to this topic in my last post, Schema.org, Open Graph, and making links to your site from Social look pretty. When you markup your content, the markup specifies things that the page contains.

Why these matter

First and foremost, using this markup will ensure that search engines can understand the intent of your pages. There are more interesting potential applications too. For one, social networks could potentially do “the right thing” with your content. For example, if a user embedded a link to a cool event and the event included markup, the social network could potentially recognize that the linked content is an event and could create the event link automatically for the user. Google+ just recently introduced a new API, History, which lets you specify various things that people encounter and do on the web. This API is powered by schema markup and could eventually give users a rich experience of content that they view. For example, a site that tracks music plays could have played music aggregated to history and this could then be combined with content tracks from another, separate, service and displayed on a common dashboard in Google+.

Examples

**Note: I have no idea as to whether these are currently or ever will be supported in Google services, however, doing “the right thing™” now will make your sites behave their best should any of these types get supported in the future.

The following markup shows how to author an event in schema.org markup:

Data annotations as a separate tags is one way of thinking about them – and yes, you can annotate paragraph tags with schema. I think of the annotations as a way to point an imaginary reader to the important sections of a site while also telling them more about what the sections represent.

The schema is microdata that can appear in any part of the page. So there really isn’t a difference, some schema is better specified in metatags in the head; other schema is better specified inline with the HTML.